How Gene Hackman Was Duped Into Shaving His Mustache For 1978's Superman
Having a mustache can be a double-edged sword, and I'm not even talking about cleaning and maintaining it. In purely stylistic and fashionable terms, pulling off a mustache instantly makes you stand out because they are such a rarity. Plenty of people out there have full beards, goatees, and various things in between, but the mustache with nothing else is a rather rare look. However, if you do have a mustache for a long time, getting rid of it can completely throw off the balance of your face. Imagine if Sam Elliot decided to shave off his mustache. Horrifying, right? I know this firsthand as my dad had a mustache most of my life and shaved it off one day without warning. He looked like a different person. If you want to get out of being a mustache person, you really can only be additive and grow in the full beard, like what my dad ended up doing. Once you prominently place hair on your face like that, it defines your whole look.
Very few people have been able to effortlessly go back and forth between being clean-shaven and having a mustache. One of them is the great Gene Hackman. In his career, he's created indelible characters that have no facial hair — like in "The French Connection," "Hoosiers," and Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" – and just as many that sport a mustache — like in "The Conversation," "Night Moves," and "The Royal Tenenbaums." I know we talk about what a wonderfully versatile actor Hackman is often, but the versatility of that facial hair status is just as important. For his role as Lex Luthor in Richard Donner's "Superman," Hackman intended to give the supervillain a mustache, but his director decided to trick the actor into getting rid of the stache.
'If you shave your mustache, I'll shave mine'
In the mid-1970s, Gene Hackman had entered a period of predominantly having a mustache, basically only getting rid of it to reprise the role of Popeye Doyle in "The French Connection II." Lex Luthor, however, doesn't even have hair on the top of his head (though "Superman" got around that quite a bit). Telling a guy to ditch his mustache can be a nuisance, and in the 2001 DVD documentary on the film's making, Hackman recalled how director Richard Donner played him like a fiddle:
"I told him I wanted to keep the mustache. And he said, 'Well, let me think about it, and when you come on the set we'll discuss it.' The first day I was in England ... he says, 'Well, what about the mustache?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know, I'd really like to keep it.' He says, 'If you shave your mustache, I'll shave mine.' And I said, 'Okay.' So I went back to makeup and we did all these things, I shaved the mustache off, and I came back on the set and we were doing the makeup test and I said, 'Dick! You've gotta shave your mustache off.' And he says, 'Okay.' And he took it and he peeled it off. And he had set that up, I loved him for doing that."
That story makes Richard Donner sounds like a hoot, and when you're an actor of Hackman's caliber stepping into a superhero project like this that's brand new and could seem frivolous, having someone playful like that at the helm makes for a perfect guide. And that connection clearly meant a lot to Hackman, as he refused to return to production on the sequel after Donner was ousted. That's real loyalty.